Critical Case Studies
Over the past decade, a renewed interest in the question of caste has emerged among political activists and academics alike. The issue of caste-based discrimination and violence has increasingly become a part of radical university organizing spaces, particularly because of the campaigning and community-based work of the South Asian American political organization Equality Labs. After years of organizing by Dalit students, in early 2022 the California State University system became the first academic institution to add caste to its anti-discrimination policy, leading to several others following in kind.
Meanwhile, Dalit and Muslim scholars in the academy have called for a new field of “critical caste studies.” Anthropologist and historian Gajendran Ayyuthurai argues that this emerging field must approach “caste as an entrenched social crisis.” In doing so, critical caste studies interrogates the formation of caste-power past and present, as well as probes the possibilities and limits of counter-caste movements.
As a field, Asian American studies has overwhelmingly focused on the experiences and perspectives of East Asian America. Although the rise of South Asian American studies in the 1990s sought to decenter such hegemonic approaches, this ‘sub-field’ has remained marginal to the core methods and theories of Asian American studies. This is particularly curious considering the impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) on the development of Asian American studies, which probed questions of imperialism, power, and knowledge production through colonial representations of West and South Asia. Returning to these foundations, this special issue queries caste as a concept and discourse entangled with modern power, and therefore indispensable to debates about class, gender, sexuality, religion, and specifically, race, in Asian American studies. Emerging out of, informed by, and intersecting with systems of colonialism, militarism, war-making, as well as providing an entryway for solidarity politics, caste offers an important site to interrogate the foundational concerns of Asian American studies.
This area emerges from the increasing relevance of caste to public and scholarly debates about the grammar of race, the master category of modernity. While the overlaps and divergences between race and caste have been explored by Dalit and Black thinkers since the 19th century – most notably by Mahatma Gandhi, BR Ambedkar, W.E.B. DuBois, and Martin Luther King Jr, among others – we believe it is important to re-engage and reinvigorate such debates in light of the resurgence of caste politics in the United States. We are particularly attuned to how anti-caste politics has emerged in the context of the war on terror in North America and South Asia, sometimes intersecting with, and other times conflicting with, movements to confront anti-Muslim racism.
JAAS coming issues will address these guiding questions, among others:
- What is the utility of caste as a category of inequality in Asian American Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies and American Studies?
- How might analyses of caste shift our analyses of racial formation and racial governance?
- How do global white supremacy and systems of coloniality inform the grammar of caste in the United States and global South Asia?
In bringing the underexplored domain of caste to bear on Asian American social theory, history, and public culture, these issues will introduce readers to emerging debates on the issue of inequality from the perspective of South Asian America. It will speak to the epistemological concerns noted above, considering how caste as a “protected category” intersects with others like race, religion, gender, sexuality, and class. By exploring the relevance of critical caste studies to existing conversations in Asian American studies, the theme of “solidarity” and its attendant parts “justice” and “public life” will be addressed. The second is to illustrate caste solidarity activism in a range of ethnographic, historical, and media based contexts. As such, each of the articles will explore a wide range of topics across disciplines relevant to Asian American studies, including, but not limited to, anthropology, critical ethnic studies, performance studies, sociology, religious studies, communication, history, and cultural studies, among others.
Suggested submission topics
- Investigating the relationship between caste and race
- Non-Hindu caste systems (Muslim, Sikh, Christian, etc) in Diasporas
- Analyses of representations of caste in South Asian/American literature, and art
- Analyses of representations of caste in politics and public culture
- Analyses of Dalit social, religious, and/or political life forged in critique of caste
- Relationship between caste abolition, settler-colonialism, and/or decolonization
- Relationship between caste abolition, war on terror, and anti-Muslim racism
- Role and presence of digital culture and social media in caste-related movements
- Social movements to ban caste discrimination
- Social movements against caste education and equality
Please address questions and inquiries to editor@jaas-journal.org.
Critical Pedagogy and Activist Scholarship
JAAS is pleased to announce a new section devoted to two pressing areas within Asian American Studies: 1) critical pedagogy and 2) activist-scholarship. In creating a special category in each issue dedicated to these issues, we hope to highlight and share the important work of scholars/teachers/activists that remains a core part of our discipline. We welcome unique essays from those engaged in Asian American Studies and/or Asian American communities – as scholars, teachers, and/or activists – to share their innovative approaches, raise tough questions, and push the field to think in ever more critical and creative ways.
These papers should clearly articulate a central argument or address a specific question central to the field of Asian American Studies.
Critical Pedagogy
We are seeking original essays that critically engage pedagogical concerns and/or provide innovative solutions relevant to the field of Asian American Studies. More than a compilation of teaching strategies, critical pedagogy is an active tool of knowledge production that unsettles commonsense assumptions through its attentiveness to practices and experiences that have historically been denied. We encourage original analytical essays that incorporate and/or extend Asian American critique in the classroom and beyond.
Activist Scholarship
We welcome new analytical interventions on the political, ethical, and/or practical issues in producing scholarship for social justice in Asian American Studies. Just as there are myriad modes of forming activist scholarship, there are just as many dilemmas and challenges in engaging the seemingly impossible divide between theory and practice and researcher and the researched.
Rather than a description of a particular organization or project, we seek analytical considerations that incorporate critical self-reflection that delve into complex questions of praxis, engage fundamental contradictions endemic to these efforts, and/or promote new innovations in activist scholarship within Asian American Studies.
Given the unique nature of these papers, they will undergo review distinct from other submissions. Each paper will be reviewed by the Journal Editor and one external reader; and will not be anonymous. Expected length is 3,000 words (excluding endnotes or other printed matter) and no abstract is required. Submissions cannot be previously published in print or online.
Submit articles online through paper submission tab on our website. Please identify “critical pedagogy” or “activist scholarship” in the title of your submission (e.g. critical pedagogy: SUBMISSION TITLE). Submissions are accepted on a rolling-basis. Queries can be directed to Dr. Rick Bonus at editor@jaas-journal.org.